In the basic setup, an FBM is composed of a set of parallel fibers organized on a regular lattice [1]}, [2]}.
Under a slowly increasing external load the fibers fail irreversibly when the local load on them
exceeds their strength value, which is assumed to have a certain degree of randomness.
Under the constraint of load conservation, the load dropped by the failed fiber gets redistributed
over the remaining intact ones. Recently, two limiting cases of load sharing have been subject to intensive investigations both with a high practical relevance: in case of equal load sharing (ELS) all intact fibers receive the same fraction of load irrespective
of their distance from the failed one, while for localized load sharing (LLS) only the intact
nearest neighbors share equally the load of the broken element [3]}, [4]}, [5]}, [6]}, [7]}. In both cases the load increments can cause
further breakings so that a single broken fiber may trigger an entire cascade of failure events.
Due to the generality of this failure spreading mechanism, fibers of the model can easily be replaced by
roads carrying traffic [8]}, [9]}, flow channels
[10]}, or electric power stations [11]}, [12]}, [13]}, [14]}, [15]}
on a high voltage transmission grid, making FBMs a basic modelling framework for cascading failure
with widespread applications on complex networks [16]}.
